Case study

Queensland Department of Education, Training and Employment

The Challenge

To underpin and enable fulfilment of the Queensland Government strategy to provide rich Digital Learning Environments, QDETE recognised that it required an identity and access management solution to enable safe and secure access to learning where and when appropriate; automate and streamline business practices and administration; reduce password reset requests; ease and streamline access through single sign on; implement policy compliance through standardisation and “business as usual” automated processes; and implement a consistent and accountable approach for the automated management of staff, students, parents, public and partners.

The Approach

QDETE appointed UNIFY Solutions (UNIFY) as its strategic partner for identity and access management in 2007. In the strategic partner role, UNIFY worked closely with QDETE to understand their business and translate this knowledge into technical specifications for each phase of the program and to manage multiple stakeholders and dependencies.

Completed in 2012, the resulting solution underpins the Department’s Digital Learning Strategy across approximately 1300 schools for over 850,000 identities based upon multiple MIM instances connecting to over 30 applications and services with several authoritative sources. The solution has met and exceeded the challenges including automated access and entitlements management, Single Sign On (federation) and Self Service Password Reset. QDETE uses UNIFY’s MIM Event Broker to extend the total FIM based solution to be real-time and event based.

The Outcome

A World-Class solution that underpins the Queensland Government’s digital learning initiatives and is a showcase for a FIM based identity and access management solution in a large, complex environment for the daily, automated management of over 850,000 identities, including:

Approximately 600,000 password changes processed every 42 days;

Over 2,000 adds, moves and changes processed daily during a normal school term;

Approximately 15,000 changes per day at the start of a school term; and

Approximately 35,000 changes per day at the start of a school year with a proven ability to manage a peak of over 120,000 daily changes.